Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  The kids laughed nervously, for all the world as if she were kidding. They scribbled notes. Some of them just recorded what she said, so they could listen to it again before the test. She’d always thought putting the material into her own words helped make it hers. She still did, but she’d come to see not everybody worked the same way. Recording sure was easier than taking notes.

  “Okay,” she said. “The smallest Yellowstone eruption was four times the size of the one from Mount Tambora—and Mount Tambora was pretty big for an ordinary volcano. How much bigger than that ‘little’ supervolcano eruption was this last one?”

  She waited. She’d told them how many cubic miles of ejecta the Yellowstone supervolcano’d belched this last time. Now they had to remember that or find it in their notes and make the calculation. Calculators and cell phones came out. Doing math in your head wasn’t quite so obsolete as writing in cuneiform, but it came close.

  A girl in the front row indignantly hit what had to be the CLEAR ERROR button. Either she’d made a mistake or she didn’t believe the answer she’d got. A skinny black guy tentatively raised his hand. Kelly nodded to him. “Nine times?” By the way he said it, he had trouble believing it, too.

  But Kelly nodded again. “That’s right,” she said. The girl in the front row looked disgusted, so she must have thought a right answer was wrong. Well, it was pretty unbelievable, all right. “If you spread the ash and dust and rock evenly all over California, it would be about twenty feet deep.”

  The ones who wrote wrote that down. Of course, the ejecta weren’t spread evenly. Lava and pyroclastic flows—the really dense stuff—stayed relatively close to the supervolcano caldera. But relatively was a relative term. Jackson, Wyoming, lay maybe sixty miles south of what had been the southern edge of Yellowstone National Park. Today, it was as one with Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of these centuries, it would probably astonish archaeologists.

  There was a hell of a funny book, one whose author she couldn’t remember, called Motel of the Mysteries. It was all about the stupid conclusions excavators with no cultural context would jump to when they dug up a twentieth-century motel. It also made you wonder how much of what you thought you knew about ancient Egypt was nothing but bullshit. Well, Jackson—and a good many other towns—would give future diggers their chance at dumbness.

  A girl who could have been anything and probably was an L.A. mutt—a little bit of everything—raised her hand. “Question?” Kelly asked.

  “Uh-huh,” the girl said. “Somebody told me you were, like, in Yellowstone when the supervolcano went off. Is that right?”

  “Um, no,” Kelly answered. “If I’d been there then, I wouldn’t be here now. Trust me on that one.” The class laughed nervously. She decided she needed to say more: “I was part of a team of geologists doing research in the park while the supervolcano was ramping up. A couple of helicopters flew us out when things started looking really scary. We’d just landed in Butte, Montana, about two hundred miles away, when it blew. I was on the runway—I mean, we’d just landed. The earthquake knocked me over, and then the wind—the blast wave, if you want to think of it like that—blew out most of the windows in the terminal, blew me down the strip, and knocked my copter over on its side.”

  “From two hundred miles away?” the girl said. “Wow!”

  “Wow,” Kelly agreed. “Yeah, from two hundred miles away. It’s—what?—eight hundred miles from Yellowstone to L.A., and you guys heard the blast here, right?” She knew Colin had. Hell, they’d heard it across the whole country. They’d heard it in Western Europe.

  “We felt the quake, too,” the girl replied. “We felt it before we heard the boom.”

  Kelly nodded. “You would have. Earthquake waves travel faster than sound.”

  “I thought the world ended,” the skinny black kid said. “Way things’re at right now, maybe I wasn’t so far wrong, either. Snow in L.A.? If that ain’t the end of the world, what is it? Anybody know for sure how long the cold weather’s gonna last?”

  Regretfully, Kelly shook her head. “Anywhere from a few years to a few hundred years. No one can tell you any closer than that. We’ve never had a supervolcano go off before when we were equipped to study it.”

  The big Samoan guy raised his hand. When Kelly pointed to him, he asked, “While you were in that helicopter just before the big eruption, were you, like, y’know, scared?”

  “No shit!” Kelly blurted.

  The undergrads burst into startled laughter. They didn’t expect that kind of language from a prof, even one who wasn’t all ancient and dusty. But what else could you say when somebody sent you a really silly question? Maybe they’d decide she was a human being after all. It might be too much to hope for, but maybe.

  “You’ve got to remember, the hot spot under the supervolcano has been active a lot longer than it’s been under Yellowstone—under what used to be Yellowstone.” Kelly had loved the park, loved hiking in it, loved the geological formations without a match anywhere in the world. All gone now. The ecosystem would be tens—more likely hundreds—of thousands of years healing. “It started up under northeastern Oregon seventeen or eighteen million years ago. As the North American tectonic plate slid along on top of it, it erupted every so often across Idaho till it got to where it is now. The Snake River Valley follows the path of the eruptions pretty well.”

  A few of the kids looked impressed. Kelly knew damn well she was. A single geological feature active across so much time . . . The hot spot that created the Hawaiian chain had been around even longer. So had the collision between India and Asia that pushed up the Himalayas. Not a whole lot of things like that.

  “There are a couple of museums in Nebraska full of beautifully preserved rhinoceros bones from eleven or twelve million years ago. The animals died around a water hole and got buried by the ash from one of the blasts when the hot spot was under Idaho.” Kelly’d known about Ashfall Historical Park for a long time. You heard of it when you studied the Yellowstone supervolcano. Funny, though, that Bryce Miller’d seen bones from that excavation when he was in Lincoln. Funny also that Kelly, as Colin’s new wife, should get to be friends with his daughter’s ex-live-in. Rocks weren’t the only things that laid down strata. So did relationships.

  It was ten till twelve. She let the class go, warning them they’d get another quiz Friday. They gave the predictable groans as they trooped out.

  She hoped she’d find an open gas station before she got home. If she didn’t, she’d have to see how the bus lines worked before she left tomorrow. She’d have to see how long getting here by bus took, too. L.A. buses sucked—a technical term. But you did what you had to do . . . if you could do anything at all.

  * * *

  There’d been a boom in apartment buildings in San Atanasio—hell, in the whole South Bay—in the 1970s. Colin Ferguson, who’d lived there a long time, remembered when they were still pretty new. The two-story courtyards with the pools and the rec rooms and the underground parking garages had had an almost Jetsons kind of cool.

  Well, platform soles and leisure suits weren’t what they had been when you could wear them without irony. Neither were those apartment buildings. They got old. They got shabby. They got run-down. Young people on the way up stopped living in them till they could afford to buy a house.

  Some of the folks who’d moved in a long time ago got old along with their apartments. Poorer people moved into other units. These days, the papers (when there were papers—the supervolcano’d almost finished the job the Net had started) always called San Atanasio a working-class community. That was the polite way to put it, anyhow.

  This particular building had a bronze plaque out front that said MARSEILLE GARDENS. The stucco was faded and cracked and chipped. It needed a new paint job. The newest paint on it was a patch where someone had halfheartedly covered up graffiti. That must have been a while
ago; fresh spray squiggles writhed across the cover-up.

  The entrance and exit to the parking garage both reminded Colin of tank traps. There was a security door to get into the lobby and another one up the flight of stairs from the lobby to the courtyard.

  Colin sighed as he got out of the unmarked cop car that was a privilege of his rank. “Another gorgeous spot,” he said.

  “Oh, hell, yes, man.” Sergeant Gabe Sanchez scratched at his salt-and-pepper mustache. He kept it as bushy as regs allowed, and then a little more besides. Officious superiors got on his ass about it. Colin couldn’t have cared less. Gabe made a hell of a good cop. Next to that, what was some face fuzz? Jack diddly, that’s what.

  A black-and-white had got there ahead of them. The red, yellow, and blue lights in the roof bar flashed one after another. In the glassed-off lobby, a uniformed cop was talking to a tiny, gray-haired woman who broke off every once in a while to cover her face with her hands. Seeing Colin and Sanchez, the cop waved. Colin nodded back.

  Gabe Sanchez sighed. “Gotta do it,” he said.

  “I’ll go in. You take a minute,” Colin told him. Gabe sent back a grateful look. He lit a cigarette as Colin climbed the stairs to the lobby. San Atanasio was as aggressively smokefree as any other SoCal city. There would have been stereophonic hell to pay had the sergeant lit up inside the car. He smoked now in quick, fierce puffs. Colin knew he’d come along as soon as he got his fix.

  When Colin walked into the lobby, the cop wearing navy blue said, “Lieutenant, this is Mrs. Nagumo—Kiyoko Nagumo. She’s the one who called 911. Her sister is in apartment, uh”—he glanced at the notes he’d been taking— “apartment 71.”

  “Thanks, Pete.” Colin turned to Mrs. Nagumo and showed his badge. “I’m Lieutenant Ferguson, Mrs. Nagumo. Your sister’s name is Eiko Ryan?” There were still some Japanese in San Atanasio. There’d been more before a lot of them headed south to Torrance and Palos Verdes as blacks and Mexicans moved in. Quite a few had intermarried with whites. Some of the resulting names were a lot more amusing than this one.

  Mrs. Nagumo said, “That’s right. We were supposed to have lunch today. I called her. She didn’t answer. I came over to see if she was okay. She’s lived here ten years now, since her husband passed away.”

  “I see.” Colin wondered how many times he’d heard stories like this. The Ryans had probably had a little tract house somewhere not far from here. After he died, even a little house might have seemed too big. Or the memories there might have hurt too much. But if Eiko Ryan wanted to stay independent, a place like this would have seemed pretty good. “What happened when you got here, ma’am?”

  By the way Pete shifted from foot to foot, he’d already asked her that. Well, tough. “I buzzed. She didn’t let me in. I rang for the manager. He knows me. He let me go in. I knocked on her door. Still nothing. I went back to the manager and asked him to open the apartment. I was afraid maybe she’d fallen or something.” She was of an age—and her sister would be, too—where a fall was liable to mean a broken hip.

  When she didn’t go on, Colin gently prodded her: “What happened then, Mrs. Nagumo? Oh—and when was the last time you did talk with your sister?”

  “It was last Friday. When we set up lunch. This is Wednesday, so—five days ago. Mr. Svanda, he complained, but he always complains. He did what I wanted him to do.” Chances were, most people did. Mrs. Nagumo couldn’t have been taller than four feet nine, but she had immense dignity. Her grief was all the more stark on account of it. “He opened the door . . . and we found her. In the bedroom. I called 911 then.” A tear ran down her wrinkled cheek.

  “Did you or Mr., uh, Svanda touch anything inside the apartment?” Colin asked. He wondered why he bothered. If this was another South Bay Strangler case, the bastard never left prints. He’d been raping and murdering little old ladies all through this part of L.A. County for years now, and nobody’d laid a glove on him.

  “Nothing much, anyway,” Kiyoko Nagumo said. “We watch TV. We know about fingerprints—oh, yes.”

  “Okay.” Colin fought a sigh. Everybody watched TV—and everybody thought the cops always caught the bad guy right before the closing commercials. Real life, unfortunately, could be a lot messier and less conclusive. And real-life cops took the heat when it was.

  “I’ve got a pretty good statement from her, Lieutenant,” Pete said as Gabe Sanchez came up the stairs to join them. “If you want to have a look at the crime scene before the forensics guys and the coroner get here—”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that,” Colin said resignedly. Mrs. Nagumo started crying again. Hearing about the coroner must have reminded her her sister was dead.

  The door up into the courtyard was open. People milled around there, the way they always did after something bad happened. A grizzled fellow limped up to Colin and Gabe. Like anyone with an ounce of sense, he knew cops when he saw them.

  “I’m Oscar Svanda,” he said. “My wife Glinda and me, we manage this building. I let Mrs. Ryan’s sister into her place, and then we seen the poor lady’s body.” He crossed himself. He looked green around the gills, and well he might. Civilians rarely saw things like that, and rarely knew how lucky they were not to.

  “Gabe, why don’t you take Mr. Svanda’s statement?” Colin said. “I do want to have a look at the apartment.”

  “Okay. I’ll catch up with you.” Gabe pulled a notebook from an inside pocket of his blue blazer. “You want to spell your last name for me so I make sure I have it right, Mr. Svanda . . . ?”

  The other uniformed officer from the black-and-white stood at the door to apartment 71. She looked a trifle green herself. “Your first Strangler case, Heather?” Colin asked, understanding that all too well.

  She managed a nod. “’Fraid so, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, welcome to the club. Now you see why we hate the son of a gun so much,” Colin said grimly. Heather nodded again, this time with more conviction.

  He walked inside. The furniture was that furnished-apartment blend of tacky and functional. The Naugahyde covering on the dinette chairs had orange flowers; the couch and chair were upholstered in industrial-strength fabric with a really horrible red, white, and black plaid. But everything was scrupulously clean and neat.

  A faint but unmistakable odor led him into the bedroom. Eiko Ryan had been there two or three days, all right. Her long flannel nightgown was hiked up to her waist. Alive, she might have been an inch or two taller than her sister—which would have done her a hell of a lot of good trying to fight off the bastard who’d killed her.

  Colin clasped his hands behind his back to make sure he didn’t touch anything. It wouldn’t matter, but he did it anyway. Habit was strong in him, and got stronger as he got older.

  He heard some kind of commotion outside. He feared he knew what kind, too. Sure as hell, Heather called, “The reporters are here, Lieutenant.”

  “Oh, joy,” Colin said, and went out to meet the press.

  IV

  Louise Ferguson felt as if she’d gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson, and he’d thrown nothing but body punches the whole time. They called it labor for a reason. She’d found that out when she’d had her first three kids. But she’d been in her early twenties then. Now she was old enough to be a granny. She felt every year of it, too, and about twenty more besides.

  She lay on the bed, flicking the TV remote. Her roommate wasn’t there—they were running some kind of test on her. She was a Korean gal who didn’t speak a whole lot of English. When she was there, she kept stealing glances at Louise, as if to say What the hell were you doing? But the answer to that was only too obvious, wasn’t it?

  James Henry Ferguson—seven pounds, nine ounces; twenty-one and a half inches—wasn’t there, either. They’d asked if she wanted him with her 24/7 or if he should stay in the nursery when she wasn’t feeding him. She’d had Rob w
ith her all the time. Despite her own exhaustion, she’d started at his every twitch and sneeze and wiggle. And she’d learned her lesson. Vanessa and Marshall had stayed in the nursery. James Henry could damn well do the same thing.

  Here was the local news. Living with Colin for so many years had given her a jaundiced view of it: blow-dried male robots and beauty-contest third runner-ups struggling to read from teleprompters. The newsies didn’t seem a whole lot smarter once she’d walked out on Colin, either.

  But the headline behind this toothy blonde in a clinging red sweater was SOUTH BAY STRANGLER STRIKES AGAIN! Louise decided not to change the channel again. Colin had started chasing the Strangler while they were still married. He still hadn’t caught him. Neither had any of the other South Bay police departments.

  “Found dead in her San Atanasio apartment was Eiko Ryan, age seventy-nine,” the newswoman said. “DNA analysis has not been completed, but the M.O. seems consistent with the notorious South Bay Strangler. Our Jerry Michaelson was on the scene.”

  Their Jerry Michaelson thrust a mike in Colin Ferguson’s face. “What can you say about this latest Strangler atrocity, Lieutenant?” he asked excitedly.

  “I don’t want to say much of anything till the lab team and the coroner do their job,” Colin answered.

  “But it is a Strangler case, isn’t it?” Michaelson persisted.

  “Right now it looks like one. And that’s about as much as I can tell you,” Colin said.